Sex Trafficking in Italy

Tribune.com.pk

When discussing slavery as an American, the first thought that comes to mind is the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that lasted for over 400 years. The second thought that comes to mind is how fortunate this country is to be done with it.

Unfortunately, it takes a few more thoughts before you start to think about modern slavery, and it takes a bit more after that before you link modern slavery to modern sex trafficking instead of the forced labor of people in developing countries. Most Americans will problem never consider that our country still experiences slavery through sex trafficking.

Many people in the Western world wouldn't, however, even though sex trafficking is prominent is almost every country around the globe, including Italy.

Austral International Press Agency

Being a country that has such a long coastline comes with many benefits for Italy. Unfortunately, it also comes with the fact that those coastlines make the perfect place for people to set up shop and begin their sex trafficking rings. 2,400 of the 9,500 reported cases of trafficking and exploitation in Europe during 2010 came from Italy. The country serves not only as a destination, but also as a transport into the rest of Western Europe, with victims coming from mostly Africa and Eastern Europe.

The victims of sex trafficking- who are mostly young girls and women from poor countries- usually end up being trafficked in order to pay off their “debt” that they received through getting out of their developing countries and into Europe. They leave their countries in order to find a source of income to send back to their families, or to get away from their war torn homes.

Many of them lack identification, which UN Special Rapporteur Joy Ezeilo says makes “the capacity of the authorities to identify victims of human trafficking ‘manifestly inadequate’”. If these women are saved, their families back home are often still harassed about the “debt” that they need to pay. The “debt” in question is, on average, more than 50,000 EUR.

Austral International Press Agency

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Nigeria is among the top 8 countries with the highest human trafficking rates in the world, and 80 percent of women trafficked to Italy come from Benin City, Nigeria.

I think that ending sex trafficking begins with ending the misogynistic thinking that exists around the world that makes people believe that a woman’s most precious asset is her body. From what I’ve read about sex trafficking in Italy, a lot of the women who are trafficked are made to do so by their husbands or their families in order to provide some source of income- as if the only way a woman in the 21^st century could obtain income is through prostitution.

One Nigerian woman, who has managed to escape sex trafficking, said that Nigerian men “don’t move a finger anymore” once they arrive in Italy. “They expect women to sell their bodies in order to provide money.” The photographer who covered her, and other Nigerian women in Italy like her, calls her Faith. Faith now is married to an Italian man and has a son outside of Turin.

We have to start teaching that women can be more than that and that women are capable of doing more than that- and not just in developing countries, where there are very overt patriarchal barriers that women face. That type of lesson also needs to be taught in the developed world (the developed world promotes this type of thinking by indulging in prostitution; simply a supply and demand issue) where there are more insidious, covert patriarchal barriers that women face.

Once we can establish that, then we can begin to work on legislature that give justice to the victims of sex trafficking- and human trafficking in general. Despite the fact that there were more than 29,000 victims of human trafficking in Italy that receive assistance to help get them out of the lifestyle, there were only 10 convictions in 2010 and 9 in 2011. There has to be laws put in place that actually convict the perpetrators of sex trafficking, because- unfortunately- there are millions of women out there who are in the similar situation of poverty. To these perpetrators, they are replaceable. Nothing changes until you start putting these people away.

It would also do the world good to address the situations that drive women into prostitution and sex trafficking. The amount of women living in poverty around the world gives the perpetrators of sex trafficking way too many people to work with- way too many women who are desperate and looking for ways to provide for their families. There needs to be better institutions put into place so that these women don’t have to rely on those types of routes to survive.

Human Trafficking Awareness Board @UN.org

These are also some of the ideas that were presented by Sarah Mendelson in Born Free as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will go into effect in 2016. Another idea presented was that there should be a worldwide standard to give every person some sort of identification, because unidentifiable people are easier to take advantage of.

And while these are all reasonable goals to set to begin the fight against human trafficking, I agree with Mendelson that these are all useless until there is an actual report that tells the world just how big the problem is and it’s useless until it becomes just as talked about and as looked out for as other world-wide problems (like terrorism, for example).  Until then, it’ll be impossible to tell just how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.